NEW CFI STUDY SAYS WASHINGTON’S VOUCHER INITIATIVE COULD BE TRANSFORMATIVE

Small Donors and Vouchers Would Replace Interest Groups as the Key Donors; The Most Important Interest Groups Are Likely to Shift from Being Donors to Donor-Mobilizers

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The voters of Washington this year will decide the fate of Initiative 1464, a proposal that would affect many aspects of campaign finance and lobbying law. A new report released by the Campaign Finance Institute (CFI) analyzes the provisions in the Initiative that relate to “democracy credits” (state-funded vouchers) and contribution limits. The analysis is based on methodologies and projection techniques CFI has developed in seventeen years of nonpartisan, peer-reviewed research on money in politics. The author is Michael J. Malbin, CFI’s Executive Director. He is also a Professor of Political Science, University at Albany (SUNY). The report’s goal is to inform public deliberations about Initiative 1464 and similar proposals. However, the initiative has many more provisions than the ones analyzed in the new report and CFI does not take positions in support of or opposition to specific pieces of legislation.

Because voucher systems are new to U.S. elections, there are no direct comparisons to use for predicting likely outcomes. Instead, CFI constructed two fully transparent, hypothetical scenarios to help understand the range of plausible possibilities.

Click to see full size figures. Source: Campaign Finance Institute analysis of data from National Institute on Money in State Politics. Note: Estimates shown are averages for all candidates, for a complete breakdown see the full report.

Based on these scenarios CFI concludes that Initiative 1464 could well have a transformative effect on Washington politics. At a minimum, it would reduce the electoral importance of the business-oriented interest groups that give the bulk of campaign contributions today. In 2012 and 2014 non-party organizations (such as PACs, corporations and labor unions) gave more than half of the money that went directly to Washington’s state legislative candidates. With the system proposed in this initiative, CFI estimates that vouchers and small donors would become the most important sources of funding. Interest groups would not disappear, but their role would shift toward becoming donor-mobilizers rather than donors themselves.

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PRACTICAL AND OBJECTIVE RESEARCH FOR DEMOCRACY

The Campaign Finance Institute is the nation's pre-eminent think tank for objective, non-partisan research on money in politics in U.S. federal and state elections. CFI's original work is published in scholarly journals as well as in forms regularly used by the media and policy making community. Statements made in its reports do not necessarily reflect the views of CFI's Trustees or financial supporters.